Vol 19 Issue 16

INSIDER 10.02.16 | VOL. 19 | ISSUE 16

STUDENT MAGAZINE

THE LIFE OF PC GAMERS

By Roope Saukkonen

Features & Recipe  The Dungeon Master  #SBP - Superb Banana Pancakes

Reviews  Cecelia Ahern: PS, I Love You  Elbow: Little Fictions  xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

EDITORIAL STAFF R

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Insider Student Magazine South-Eastern University of Applied Sciences Paraatikenttä 7 45100 Kouvola

Editor in chief: Hugh Clack INSIDER ISSN 1457-1587

PHONE +358 44 702 8758 WEBSITE insider.kyamk.fi EMAIL insider@kyamk.fi WRITERS first.last@student.kyamk.fi

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HAPPY 18 BIRTHDAY, INSIDER

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How time flies. My baby is all grown up, becoming an adult this week at 18 years of age. I never expected this when she was born on 9th February 1999. Who is this baby that I am surprised to reach adulthood you ask? Insider Student Magazine of course, 18 years old this week!

Over the last 18 years Insider has gone through the early stages of a simple black & white, mainly textual publication, with only a small amount of images included. The introduction of a website in the early years started pushing Insider internationally and enlarging the readership. With the availability of digital photography and affordable colour printing, Insider’s youth was established and the personality went through many changes. In the last five years, we have seen many transformations and additions to this teenager. With the website developing, and a continuous social media presence – as with any teen these days – Insider has emerged as an adult ready to take on the responsibilities representing

student life and interests in our new Xamk University of Applied Sciences continuing from 2017.

The editorial team will continue to bring you news and events of happenings at Xamk, and also elsewhere, that student interests are represented.

Our ever-popular Movie and Books reviews, are now also supplemented with Games. Food will continue to bring you international recipes to spice up your student lives and our profiles will introduce you to students and staff of Xamk.

We hope you will continue to enjoy this new responsible adult, and keep reading as she continues to blossom in life and explores adult life to the full, who knows, maybe she will start a family in the future!

k c a l C h g u H

EDITOR IN CHIEF

THE DUNGEON MASTER A mobile game will take you back to the glory days of Flash games; Poorly drawn, simple, yet addictive web games which you would sneak onto during a boring class. Flash games are still around but not as popular. Instead of being made by one or two people, they are being made by teams of people.

The budget is going up and with it the free-to-play mobile model is being retroactively added into the Flash scene. As the customer base of mobile users increases and the number of casual PC users decreases, the lines are starting to blur but ultimately we are a mobile world. In a mobile environment, these games and apps are meant to be used on the go. It makes me sad to think that Finland is so heavily invested in mobile games when the reality is that they are usually just a distraction to take your mind off of what you are currently leaving in the toilet. Then you put the phone back in your pocket, after collecting more bacteria than the common keyboard, you later re-

veal it again to snuggle against your cheek as you talk to your loved one, boss, or imaginary friend.

Enough talk about where mobile games end up. There needs to be a discussion about where they are. As previously mentioned, most mobile games follow a free-to-play model.

This business model is at best desperate and at worst shady. Freeto-play works or “operates” by luring victims into its dark dungeon. It gives the gamer some gifts for free just to show how generous he is. As the victim steps further into the abyss, she is praised for her ability to overcome such challenges so quick. The cushion builds in her mind and she starts to feel comfortable with all these accolades, like she can conquer any obstacle the dungeon throws at her. Then, the dungeon master takes away her pillows, he takes away her couch, carpet and jewellery. The master switches off the lights and turns off the heating. The girl is left in the darkness with only a sinister voice guiding her.

The bellowing voice utters: “Remember when you felt so comfortable, safe, and on top of the world? Well this can continue if you kneel before me and promise your first born child.”

Often times the girl will say “Screw this, I’ll just turn around and walk out the exit back to normal life.” But then there are the times when the girl says “I want to stay here and explore, I don’t need my first child, I can just have a second one later.”

Little does this second girl know that she has developed Stockholm syndrome. She has become comfortable with being a hostage.

This is her new home. The dungeon master will later ask for her second born as well, and in the back of her mind she knows this, yet she remains.

Free-to-play relies on this less than 1% of victims who become brainwashed or who just have enough kids to spare. The businesses which use this model boast of success and glory, when in reality, they were just lucky. They played the lottery and won, but only after buying thousands of tickets. When games rely on this dungeon method to keep gamers hooked, they sacrifice any ounce of soul which could be salvaged from the game.

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It is just a ruse to make money, not a creative endeavour. Games which charge up front may only ask 1-10€ to gain full access without any advertising. No bait-and-switch here, and it results in a well-rounded product with more satisfied customers. Sure if they rely on the “big wales” of the free-to-play to fund themselves, the developers may earn thousands of euros per wale. Is this really the right way to operate a business? Is this what the market really wants from their games?

Mobile games need to earn our respect but this is definitely not the way to do it. Until then, they will be known as the distraction for your journeys to the water closet.

Grayson Leif Heflin

WHAT DOES BEING THE EVEN MEAN? Being part of the most powerful master race of all time is hard work. It devours countless of hours of hard mechanical work to build and maintain your perfect PC and defending her name against other less worthy infidels who claim console gaming is as fun and as potent as PC gaming. (They are clearly wrong and you should not listen to them any longer.) Being part of the master race requires also high motorial-, social- and strategic skills. You have the most powerful machine so clearly you are the dominant player of them all. If this is not true, the other team is clearly cheating and you MUST imply this through the game’s text- or voice chat by screaming how they don’t match to yours and your PC’s level of skill. (You are the polite social gamer after all.) And your ever so clever strategic mastermind of a brain is making so delicate calculations to overcome the other team that if your own team won’t follow your carefully given instructions they are just plain stupid. Right?

This is wrong, thanks Donald! Yeah, this is wrong and an internet meme. For me this is a parody of how one thing can change everything when you are both the victim and judge of the matter. Being a PC gamer doesn’t mean you are some kind of super human, or better person. Sometimes owning a PC and playing games especially on the internet can make your Mr. Hyde come out.

Being a PC gamer means that you prefer your keyboard and mouse play style, or you enjoy building and maintaining your PC. Owning a PC has a lot of perks. For example, most modern computers are multimedia devices. You can work, watch and create videos/ pictures, use your PC to chat with your friends, listen to music and sometimes even play video games with it. 

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THE LIFE OF PC GAMERS

By Roope Saukkonen

YOUR OWN LITTLE PROCESSING TOWN A computer is a calculating machine which can create pixels and noise by letting electricity through a microprocessor. By arranging the pixels in a certain way, you can create a picture and [Editor: “For the love of god! Everyone knows what a computer is! Tell them something useful!”] “Right, sorry!”

So, a computer is a punch of processors, cables, data storages, fans and microchips put to-

gether to create picture, video and sound. But for a PC gamer your PC is something more.

She has some poetic beauty in her and she is a lot more than the sum of her parts. You can also see that I am a super nerd from me referring PC to her not it. But when you spend as much time building PCs, using them and tinkering with them as I do you really start to develop a habit to call your lifeless metal partner something.

IS A MAC EVEN A COMPUTER? The ever-raging computer question “Which one is the supreme computer Mac or Windows?”.

Frankly I don’t care too much which one is “The superior” because both have a lot of good and bad points. It depends more upon the end user’s preferences and needs, which operating system aka computer will be the better one. If you are for example a web developer, then Apple’s Macs will most likely give you more power and room to do your work. At the same time your job might be at a Windows powered company where the company has a contract with Microsoft to use only their products for lower prices. Like web development, programming is also more enjoyable on iOS X than it is on Windows because Win10 isn’t the best oper-

ating system to give you useful crash reports and keep your computer from updating while building your code.

For me Windows is the better system and the operating system of my choice. I just have used Windows a lot more than Mac or god help me Linux (I have almost zero knowledge of Linux systems.) And from gamer’s point of view PC is the way to go since there is way less games for iOS X and basically none for Linux. And yeah, I know App store has a lot of “games” in it but this topic isn’t about the deeper meaning of video games, this is about being a PC gamer. For me the Window’s key bindings and the user interface is a more natural one.

GAMING NEED A LOT OF POWER BUT SHOULD YOU HAVE IT? GTX1080 or 1070? Intel i7 or AMD FX Bulldozer? Vega or Pascal? What are these things and why should I care? Well if you are normal PC user then these things won’t matter to you too much. Normally you use your computer for work or as media player but if you want to play video games and have the most out of them, like from graphics, play feel and sound then these names and number are your life blood.

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There are three major computer part designers Intel, AMD and nVidia. Intel and AMD are making the most of the CPUs on the market and AMD and nVidia are making the most of the GPUs. Then there are the manufacturers like Asus, Fujitsu and Gigabyte but they don’t own the immaterial rights or designs for the processors or microchip design. They just manufacture, advertise and sell the parts to stores.

SECOND OPINION Though I've been primarily a PC gamer most of my life, I've never been a stranger to dedicated gaming consoles either. That's because in my mind these 2 have traditionally filled quite different niches.

PCs have been for "heavy" games; the kind you sink into by yourself for hours on end and the buttons and accuracy of a console's controller would not be enough. If not played alone, it's done through the Internet with other similarly absorbed people. Accordingly, even acquiring and maintaining a PC is a somewhat difficult task when compared to consoles. You can mix and match parts from different manufacturers and even upgrade your machine after the initial purchase, but if you're not careful, you can run into incompatibility issues with old and new games alike. The price of PC hardware is also limiting for many would-be-gamers.

Consoles on the other hand, I've considered less involving experiences. And I don't mean that as a negative! I tend to boot up console games spontaneously for shorter sessions, and setting up multiplayer matches with friends in the same room is a breeze compared to PC, where the expectation would be that people play online instead. Even obtaining a console is simpler and cheaper by an order of magnitude, compared to PC gaming.

While the added hurdles of playing on computers are worth it for many gamers due to it offering a greatly different experience, I feel that lately this dichotomy has been disappearing somewhat. Many of the biggest game titles are

released cross-platform, and the ports have become identical in looks and function. For some time now even dedicated gaming consoles are expected to be online by default and games to be updated before playing. The games have online multiplayer by default, and some have thus ditched local multiplayer altogether. This generation we're even seeing current consoles re-released with improved hardware, which would've been near unthinkable 5 years ago.

It seems that due to the changing demands of developers and users, consoles are set to become more PC-like, while PCs aren't exactly consolifying themselves (despite Microsoft's attempts).

In the end, I still choose to do my gaming on both personal computers and consoles, for the differences in the offerings of both platforms are great enough to justify it, in my book. On PCs you can also greatly modify your games and create entirely new ones if you have the technical know-how, and the heaviest strategy games and simulators of PCs are virtually impossible to adapt to the hardware and input methods of consoles. On the other hand, setting up party games in the living room with several controllers would be a party-killing hassle when attempted with most computers. And at the end of the day, platform exclusive titles are something you only get to experience if you have the right device, justifying even gaming enthusiasts' more questionable hardware purchases in my book.

Aleksi Kontiainen

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#SBP - SUPERB BANANA PANCAKES Because we are adults, we can decide whether to start our day properly with a healthy, nutritious breakfast, or instead eat virtually nothing and be all tired and shaking during the first lectures. Many of us make the second decision. The ones that chose the first option, are looking all fresh and energetic already at 8.15am. We who didn't eat anything are now hating their guts. God, they are so annoying, why won't they just go away with all that bursting energy!

What did the healthy breakfast eaters have then? Maybe porridge, sandwiches, who knows and who cares. But if we would have chosen to eat something, it could've been something a bit different this morning. Something good. Something like pancakes. But healthy pancakes, not the ones that Americans eat.

If we decided to make the adult decision to eat well before school, we would need only a few ingredients for it. Two bananas, two eggs and some butter. And blueberries or strawberries, berries of your taste to add on top of the pancake once it's ready. In order to prepare a lovely pancake breakfast we would first mash the bananas (we could do it with a hand blender to get the mixture really smooth but a fork would do the job quite OK as well), break the eggs and mix them and then combine these amazing elements together.

We would prepare the pancake on a frying pan with mild heat and a lot of butter. Banana pancakes burn easily so we would be extremely careful with them.

Finally, we'd sprinkle berries of our choice on top and voilĂ , a superb breakfast!

Suvi Karell

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“Don’t be afraid to fall in love again.

Watch out for that signal when life as you know it ends.

P.S. I will always love you”

PS, I LOVE YOU PS, I Love You is a book written by the Irish writer Cecelia Ahern.

The book is about a couple whose names are Holly and Gerry, they are a married couple who live in Dublin. They are passionately in love, but just like any other couple, they fight and argue once in a while. It all starts when Gerry dies suddenly because of a brain tumour, and it changes Holly’s life completely. The death of Gerry makes Holly realize how much he meant to her, and how deep their love was. And also, Holly starts realizing how stupid their fights were, and if she could go back, she would do most of the stuff differently.

Cecelia Ahern is an Irish writer, and her very first novel was PS, I Love You, published in 2004.

This book reached No. 1 best-seller status in many countries, such as Ireland, Britain, the United States, Germany and the Netherlands. She has also published many other novels and short stories.

Cecelia Ahern has also created and produced the ABC comedy called “Samantha Who?”.

While dealing with the grief, Holly receives a phone call from her mother, who informs her about a package that has been addressed to her. Inside the package there are ten envelopes, one for each month, and they are all written by her beloved husband, Gerry, before his death. All of the letters are encouraging Holly to continue with her life, and to be brave enough to go on new adventures. With the help of Gerry’s letters, and Holly’s family’s and friend’s support, she learns to laugh again, overcome her fears and discover a world she never knew existed.

Each letter that Gerry had written ends with “P.S. I Love You”, which showed Holly how much she meant to him.

  Setareh Nourzad

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ELBOW

LITTLE FICTIONS Craig Potter

Alternative // February 3, 2017

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ounding somewhere between Peter Gabriel and Radiohead, the English alternative quartet Elbow has been putting out steadily acclaimed albums ever since the early 2000s. Their records have netted them a couple of Mercury Prize nominations, one victory, a Brit Award, an NME Award, alongside bunch of others.

Their seventh studio album Little Fictions continues on the band’s usual track, featuring serene guitar melodies and melancholic vocal harmonies, with vocalist Guy Garvey’s distinct voice hovering gently above the instrumental arrangements. Nothing seems to have changed drastically since 2014’s The Take Offs and Landings of Everything, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

The opening track “Magnificent (She Says)” features dramatic violins throughout its bridges and choruses.

Little Fictions was done in collaboration with The Hallé symphonic orchestra and their choir, which fits the sound of Elbow tremendously, giving their occasional fits of dramatic grandiosity a little extra oomph. “Trust the Sun” combines its weird, out-of-touch lyrics with equally disoriented song structure. “Firebrand & Angel” comprises of two distinct parts, the first of which is dominated by a repeating, percussive piano riff. The latter portion of the song features a ticking guitar track, scratching away as the looping refrain builds a layer on top of layer with each repeat. “K2” combines an airy, almost ambient-level of instrumentation with a constant stream of echoing vocals, building a sound-

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scape as vast and lonely as the mountain the track was named after.

Despite the great number of great tracks, the biggest weakness of Little Fictions is perhaps its refusal to diverge, both when compared to previous Elbow material, and occasionally with itself, which causes some tracks on the album to sound a bit too alike. The bittersweet yet uplifting slower tracks “All Disco”, “Montparnasse” and “Kindling” suffer from this the most, with their similar vocal melodies and slow tempo making the two latter tracks feel like reprises of the former.

Individually listened each those three tracks are fine, but as a part of the album they just sort of meld into a formless, indistinguishable mass.

Despite this small problem Little Fictions is a worthy continuation to Elbow’s even discography. It does not try to shake things up, which means that your enjoyment of the album can be directly predicted by how much have you enjoyed their previous material. If you’ve enjoyed their heartfelt, bittersweet soulfulness, this one might just be their most intimate and soulful yet. However, if you’ve found them slow and dull, Little Fictions doesn’t even attempt to correct you. If you have never listened to Elbow, this is as good place to start as any.  Roope Sorvo

XXX: RETURN OF XANDER CAGE

STUDIO 123 Kymenlaaksonkatu 1 45700 Kuusankoski 05 3792082 www.studio123.fi

STUDIO 1 LEGO BATMAN-MOVIE (7) | 11€ | 1h45min Every Evening 17:00h (2D, dub) Sat-Sun 15:00h (3D, dub) Sat, Mon, Wed, 19:00h (2D, orig.)

VIN DIESEL DONNIE YEN DEEPIKA PADUKONE RUBY ROSE RORY MCCANN NINA DOBREV ICE CUBE Director D.J. Caruso // Writers Rich Wilkes & F. Scott Frazier Action/Adventure/Thriller

Xander Cage is left for dead after an incident, though he secretly returns to action for a new, tough assignment with his handler Augustus Gibbons. So despite the name and the rating this movie is in fact not porn - although it got a lot more going for itself in that regard than 50 Shades of Grey.

In this US version of the Kingsmen Samuel L. Jackson (not the bad guy this time) spends his days talking to young professionals in the field of "looking for potentially life-ending adrenalin-filled cheap thrills" and asks them to join the Avengers XXX-task force. I'd like to stress once again that it's really not porn related even though names like Xander Cage and Tennyson Torch might give you that impression. Anyhow, these daredevils (it's also not Defenders-related somehow) are then send to save the US government from the evil Russians because that trope just never seems to get oldie Hollywood.

So much for the premise of the movie. While it doesn't offer anything new in the field of action movies - it has loveable characters portrayed by a fantastic cast. Despite seeing all those very sinnable scenes and counting the moments when either one of the on-screen characters should have been killed but weren't, I still didn't find it as mind-numbingly aweful as Mission:Impossible. That is possibly due to the fact that Tom Cruise wasn't in it. I felt it was infact a quite watchable movie. Perhaps my expectations as to what is watchable have just dropped to a new low in 2017 or maybe sometimes watching people do the impossible and surviving against all odds is refreshing or maybe, just maybe, the movie was just not that bad.

I would compare it to the first two in the series but I've never seen them.

I mean seriously what is the point: They're all the same anyways, right?  Sarah Rosenthal

FIFTY SHADES DARKER (16) | 12€ | 1h58min Every Evening 19:10h

STUDIO 2 LIFE, ANIMATED (S) | 11€ | 1h31min Sat-Sun 15:30h Mon 17:15h Tue 17:00h ONNELI, ANNELI JA SALAPERÄINEN MUUKALAINEN (S) | 10€ | 1h15min Fri-Sun, Wed-Thu 17:15h LA LA LAND (S) | 11€ | 2h08min Fri, Sun, Tue, Thu 18:50h

STUDIO 3 LION (16) | 11€ | 1h59min Sat-Sun 15:15h TOIVON TUOLLA PUOLEN (12) | 11€ | 1h38min Fri-Mon, Wed 17:30h MOONLIGHT (12) | 11€ | 1h51min Fri, Sun-Mon, Wed-Thu 19:30h ROGUE ONE (12) | 12€ | 2h13min Sat, Tue 19:30h

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